AustLit

'In the week before the May 2022 general election, decks of playing cards depicting a boat in distress were distributed to children at the Cisarua refugee learning centre in West Java. The cards show the small boat lurching dangerously, as waves pile high above it. Tiny brown figures hang over the sides at risk of falling or jumping overboard. One clings to a shaky mast. A woman lies prone on the deck. The cards are stamped with the Australian coat of arms and a link to the government’s Zero Chance campaign. The visuals echo those of a previous scare campaign directed at asylum seekers, titled No Way: You will not make Australia home. No Way included a short film that culminated with a scene of a boat engulfed by the ocean, accompanied by the soundtrack of a desperate heartbeat fading into silence.' (Introduction)

'I grew up in a violent home. We kept this violence secret. I never told my school friends, we never told the relatives we were allowed to see, and in the cold light of a morning after, we barely mentioned it among ourselves.' (Introduction)

'One night a few years ago our neighbour Lisa knocks on our door. Her two young daughters are with her and I can tell something is up. The oldest, Sally, has just started primary school and the youngest, Patty, is a couple of years behind. We normally talk every day – mostly it’s the girls chatting away to me while I work out the front – but I haven’t seen them around much over the last few weeks. I’ve been worried about them and we are all happy to see each other.' (Introduction)

'It’s all happening very quickly. Work passes by in a blur. I barely have time to read. When I do, it’s on a deadline. I swallow knowledge without chewing and then I spit it back up just as fast. I turn it over in my mind exactly once, flipping it onto its back, and then throw it back out into the sea. Just last week I went to a meeting of a critical theory reading group I’m in: I read the book, entitled For a Left Populism, by Chantal Mouffe, a prominent post-Marxist, in the two hours beforehand. During the meeting I mention, sheepish, that when I was younger I was a post-Marxist. That is, I found it conceivable that material determinations could not a priori be privileged over others: that the class structure did not pre-exist the social, or that domination could be formulated in terms other than class terms. I scoffed at class reductionists who failed to realise that there would continue to be misogyny, violence against women, or unequal distribution of social reproductive labour under communism or socialism. Such a post-Marxist was I that I would often anger my former partner by insisting that I wanted to name my firstborn child – whom I don’t have time to conceive, birth or raise – ‘hegemonise’, a term that crops up often in this particular niche of academia. I don’t want to name my child – who doesn’t exist because I don’t have time to make them – hegemonise. I was only trying to goad my partner, thought it was funny. With a straight face, I’d insist: ‘C’mon! You have to admit, it’s an original name. No one else will have done it before.’' (Introduction)

'The act of writing from lived experience as a trauma survivor involves making choices beyond the literary and political decisions a writer ordinarily makes. It carries added risks and can have emotional, psychological and practical consequences for the writer. This is particularly so for survivors from racialised communities. In writing my memoir The Mother Wound, which is about losing my mum in an act of domestic violence perpetrated by my father in 2015, it felt important that I tell my story in a nuanced way, resisting self-tokenisation, stereotypes, and sensationalism. There were considerations around mitigating harm without compromising truth, contextualising personal struggles within political realities, and understanding where my work sat within broader conversations about gender-based violence, #metoo and domestic abuse in Australia. Understanding the effects of trauma and building a trauma-informed approach into my writing practice has allowed me to navigate some of these risks and foster a writing practice that facilitates personal healing despite the risk of re-traumatisation.' (Introduction)

'At the end of November 2020, I was asked to contribute to a Facebook event called 16 Days of Activism. It was run by Greens senator Larissa Waters and it was part of a campaign to end violence against women. I was the twelfth woman on the list; each of us had shared and would share stories about ourselves in a short Facebook interview. The response from readers had been positive and supportive. Larissa was bringing into view a broad range of exemplary women doing what they could to end violence against women. I felt honoured to be asked, because though my work falls into the area of women’s anti-violence, it is a bit more niche. I’m part of the trans community and my role is to improve the lives of trans and gender diverse people. That means I tend to focus extensively on trans women and families with trans children.' (Introduction)

'Susan Varga was a child of five when she left Hungary for life in Australia. It was December 1948, the Communist regime was in power, the Iron Curtain was about to fall, and on the train that day, there were seven of them: her mother Heddy, her sister Jutka, her brand-new stepfather – whose name they were travelling under – his brother, his wife and their baby. As they approached Austria, the border guard came to check their documents, their passports stamped Never To Return. ‘What is your name, Miss?’ he asks the young Suszi. She punches her fist, and says, ‘I know. I know it, I know! But I’ve forgotten.’'  (Introduction)

'At its start and end, Summertime is about two pigs: Jimmy and Katy. Jimmy survived the catastrophic fires of 2019-20. Katy died, even though her human companions had moved the pigs to what they believed was safer ground. Those human companions are Summertime’s author, sociologist Danielle Celermajer, and her partner, called T in the book.'  (Introduction)